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Three cars carrying the women and 14 children were traveling between the Mexican states of Sonora and Chihuahua Monday when officials say members of a criminal group, possibly a cartel, attacked them.

Rhonita Marie Miller, 30, was driving with some of her seven children to Arizona to pick up her husband, Howard, who was in the US for work,

Howard Miller, the adult male pictured, is alive and is not believed to have been present at the attack.

Donald Trump backed away from further military confrontation with Iran on Wednesday after days of escalating tensions, saying Tehran appeared to be standing down following missile attacks on two Iraqi bases hosting US and coalition troops.

Trump delivered remarks in the Grand Foyer of the White House, hours after Iran declared the attack to be retaliation for the US drone strike last week that killed the senior Iranian Gen Qassem Suleimani.

“Iran appears to be standing down, which is a good thing for all parties concerned and a very good thing for the world,” Trump said, reading from teleprompters. “No American or Iraqi lives were lost because of the precautions taken, the dispersal of forces, and an early warning system that worked very well.”

Iran has announced that it will no longer abide by any of the limits imposed by the unravelling 2015 nuclear deal, and Iraq’s parliament urged its leaders to expel troops from the US-led coalition, as the aftershocks of the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Suleimani reverberated through the Middle East.

the Iranian government said the country would no longer observe limitations on uranium enrichment, stockpiles of enriched uranium or nuclear research and development. But the statement noted that the steps could be reversed if Washington lifted its sanctions on Tehran.

The Iraqi parliament’s call to expel US troops was another clear sign of blowback from the assassination – and was quickly hailed by Suleimani’s supporters as a major step towards one of his main goals.

Trump’s supporters call him a monster and pound their chests in righteous triumph, as if the purpose of the strike was to show our power and produce a moment of visceral satisfaction at seeing dead this man who’d mocked American resolve for years

A lot of commentary has focused on whether Soleimani deserved to be killed

But the main question about the strike isn’t moral or even legal—it’s strategic.

Human rights activists and community leaders in Colombia are being killed at an alarming rate

There were 107 activists killed in Colombia last year, she said, with 13 other cases under investigation that could bring the total to 120.

This terrible trend is showing no let-up in 2020, with at least 10 human rights defenders already reportedly killed during the first 13 days of January

This new decade's consequential first weeks began with the United States openly targeting and killing a foreign military leader for the first time since World War II. They ended with the tragic, unintended cost of conflict -- Iran admitting it mistakenly shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing all 176 people on board.

Ukraine is demanding a full investigation and compensation for the victims -- mostly Iranian, Canadian and Ukrainian -- who died when the airliner was shot out of the sky, hours after Iran launched a number of missiles at two bases housing US troops in Iraq.

In the meantime, the latest USA Today poll since these hostilities started, say Americans do not feel safer since Iran's top general was killed.The poll found that 55% of Americans say the killing of Soleimani makes the US less safe, while 57% oppose the threat of US airstrikes on Iran's cultural sites and 53% support Congress limiting Trump's ability to order military strikes. Elsewhere, anti-Americanism has soared around the world since Trump took office, according to new Pew research published Wednesday.

Another racial text—published by the nation’s premier social-science organization, the American Economic Association, and classified by the historian Evelynn Hammonds as “one of the most influential documents in social science at the turn of the 20th century”—elicited more shock in 1896.

“Nothing is more clearly shown from this investigation than that the southern black man at the time of emancipation was healthy in body and cheerful in mind,” Frederick Hoffman wrote in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro. “What are the conditions thirty years after?” Hoffman concluded from “the plain language of the facts” that black Americans were better off enslaved. They are now “on the downward grade,” he wrote, headed toward “gradual extinction.”

Hoffman knew his work was “a most severe condemnation of moderate attempts of superior races to lift inferior races to their elevated positions.” He rejected that sort of assimilationist racism, in favor of his own segregationist racism. The data “speak for themselves,” he wrote. White Americans had been naturally selected for health, life, and evolution. Black Americans had been naturally selected for disease, death, and extinction. “Gradual extinction,” the book concluded, “is only a question of time.

On Aug. 30, 1954, Bernice E. Eddy, a veteran scientist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., was checking a batch of a new polio vaccine for safety.Created by Jonas Salk, the vaccine was hailed as the miracle drug that would conquer the dreaded illness that killed and paralyzed children. Eddy’s job was to examine samples submitted by the companies planning to make it.As she checked a sample from Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, Calif., she noticed that the vaccine designed to protect against the disease had instead given polio to a test monkey. Rather than containing killed virus to create immunity, the sample from Cutter contained live, infectious virus.

As scientists and politicians desperately search for medicines to slow the deadly coronavirus, and as President Trump touts a malaria drug as a remedy, a look back to the 1955 polio vaccine tragedy shows how hazardous such a search can be, especially under intense public pressure.

Despite Eddy’s warnings, an estimated 120,000 children that year were injected with the Cutter vaccine

In the midst of the COVID-19 epidemic, we are being urged by governments and the media to “trust the experts” – that is, public health officials

historians are experts too. Of course our expertise is different, but what it tells us, and what we should communicate to the public, is that “trusting the experts” isn’t nearly as simple as it may seem.

By definition, experts know much more about a given subject than the rest of us: that’s their great strength. But experts can also suffer from tunnel vision: though they know  their own specialties, they may fail to look left or right and see the larger contexts, consequences, or costs of their actions

An audio recording of the grand jury inquiry into the killing of Breonna Taylor was made public on Friday, a rare disclosure that shed light on the evidence jurors considered in the proceedings.

15 hours long

captured interviews with witnesses, audio of 911 calls and other evidence presented to jurors over two and a half days.

(CNN)The coalition led by Saudi Arabia fighting in Yemen denied that it deliberately targeted a detention center in airstrikes on Friday that killed dozens and caused a nationwide internet blackout.

At least 82 people were killed and 266 injured in the attack, the majority of whom are in critical condition, according to Houthi Health Minister Taha Al-Mitwakel. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) earlier said 70 people were killed and 130 were wounded.

Another airstrike early Friday hit a telecommunications building in the strategic port city of Hodeidah, causing a nationwide internet blackout, according to NetBlocks, an organization that tracks network disruptions.

The former officer, Anwar Raslan, was accused of overseeing a detention center where prosecutors said at least 4,000 people were tortured and nearly 60 were killed.

He fled Syria in 2012 after the government committed a massacre in his hometown, killing more than 100 people. He joined Syria’s exiled opposition and traveled with them to peace talks in Geneva in 2014.

Through nearly 11 years of civil war, the Syrian government bombed residential neighborhoods, used poison gas and tortured countless detainees in state lockups

This is broadly what we know happened: Shortly after launching the intensive early-morning rocket attack, elite Hamas units simultaneously rushed multiple military outposts on the Gaza-Israel border. They quickly overwhelmed the posts, killing or kidnapping virtually all the soldiers in them. They then destroyed the observation and communications networks on which the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) depended for identifying breaches of the border fence.

In parallel, Hamas launched an aerial and naval attack using several dozen motor-powered hang gliders, armed drones, and small speed boats. In the ensuing chaos, the fence was breached by bulldozers, explosives, and wire-cutters in up to 80 spots along the northern and eastern border between Gaza and Israel, facilitating the main thrust of the attack.

Over 1,500 armed militiamen on pickup trucks, motorbikes, and SUVs rushed across the border into adjacent Israeli kibbutzim, moshavim, and towns. Several dozen militiamen also headed to the scene of a youth music festival where around 3,500 revelers were camped in tents and cars. This became the epicenter of a massacre.

Suddenly, five low-flying helicopters thrummed overhead, some firing weapons and drawing gunfire in return. Villagers ran for their lives. But there was nowhere to escape: The helicopters were dropping soldiers on the town’s outskirts to block all the exits.

In Moura, the security forces “may have also raped, looted, arrested and arbitrarily detained many civilians,” according to the mission, which is preparing a report on the incident.

However, using satellite imagery, The New York Times identified the sites of at least two mass graves, which matched the witnesses’ descriptions of where captives were executed and buried.

A bomb tore through a Shiite mosque in Peshawar, in northwestern Pakistan, on Friday, killing at least 57 people and wounding more than 100 in one of the worst terrorist attacks in Pakistan in several years.

Police officials said that at least one gunman on a motorcycle had killed two police guards before entering the mosque and detonating what appeared to be a suicide vest, while another official said there were two attackers.

Asked if they were able to identify the bodies, he said that in many cases the police had just brought severed body parts to the hospital.

Bush and Obama have built infrastructure any devil would lust after. Behold the items on an aspiring tyrant's checklist that they've provided their successors:A precedent that allows the president to kill citizens in secret without prior judicial or legislative reviewThe power to detain prisoners indefinitely without charges or trialOngoing warrantless surveillance on millions of Americans accused of no wrongdoing, converted into a permanent database so that data of innocents spied upon in 2007 can be accessed in 2027Using ethnic profiling to choose the targets of secret spying, as the NYPD did with John Brennan's blessingNormalizing situations in which the law itself is secret -- and whatever mischief is hiding in those secret interpretationsThe permissibility of droning to death people whose identities are not even known to those doing the killingThe ability to collect DNA swabs of people who have been arrested even if they haven't been convicted of anythingA torture program that could be restarted with an executive order

we're allowing ourselves to become a nation of men, not laws. Illegal spying? Torture? Violating the War Powers Resolution and the convention that mandates investigating past torture? No matter. Just intone that your priority is keeping America safe.

This isn't a argument about how tyranny is inevitable. It is an attempt to grab America by the shoulders, give it a good shake, and say: Yes, it could happen here, with enough historical amnesia, carelessness, and bad luck. We're not special. Our voters won't always pick good men and women to represent us.

The fundamental reason kids are dying in massacres like this one is not that we have lunatics or criminals — all countries have them — but that we suffer from a political failure to regulate guns.

Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries

American schoolchildren are protected by building codes that govern stairways and windows. School buses must meet safety standards, and the bus drivers have to pass tests. Cafeteria food is regulated for safety. The only things we seem lax about are the things most likely to kill.

The police, all in plainclothes, were inspecting security in the southern Cairo suburb of Helwan early Sunday when four gunmen in a pickup truck attacked them, according to Egypt’s state-run Middle East News Agency.

The Islamic State said in a statement on Twitter that “a carefully selected group of the soldiers of the caliphate” c

t said the attack was to commemorate 1,000 days since Egyptian security forces massacred what human rights groups describe as hundreds of protesters in August 2013 at Rabaa Square in Cairo.

CAIRO — Unidentified gunmen sprayed bullets on a police minibus as it passed through a Cairo district early on Sunday, killing eight plainclothes officers in an ambush that was later claimed by the Islamic State.

Although the Islamic State’s claim of responsibility could not be independently verified, its format and language was consistent with earlier statements from the group. The Islamic State also claims to have

The Egyptian Interior Ministry said in a statement that four assailants had fired on the unmarked police minibus as it passed through Helwan

Charlotte shooting: State of emergency amid protests

North Carolina's governor has declared a state of emergency in the city of Charlotte, after violence erupted during a second night of protests over the police killing of a black man.

Keith Lamont Scott was shot dead by a black officer on Tuesday.